Sql question: Getting Parent rows followed by child rows

Question

id parent_id

1 0

2 0

3 2

4 0

5 1

6 0

I need a query that will return parent rows (parent_id=0) f

Answer 1

You'd use a recursive CTE for this:

WITH r AS 
 (SELECT id, 
    NULL AS parent_id, 
    CAST(right('000' + CAST(row_number() 
         OVER (table.id) AS varchar), 3) AS varchar(50))
  FROM table WHERE parent IS NULL

  UNION ALL

  SELECT table.id, table.parent_id, 
    CAST(r.ord + right('000' + CAST(row_number() 
         OVER (ORDER BY table.id) AS varchar), 3) AS varchar(50))
  FROM r JOIN table 
   ON table.parent = r.id)

 SELECT id 
 FROM r
 ORDER BY left(ord + '000000000000000000000000000000000', 36)

Note that this particular version will break if any ID has a value greater than 999, and it will break if you have more than 12 levels. If this is a concern to you, you need to adjust the number of zeroes in the various places.

There might be better ways, but this one works.

Answer 2

Here is an example solution using a union with an order by clause (It wont work for deep nesting though).

SELECT  p.id, 
        p.parent_id, 
        p.name,  
        p.id AS sequence
FROM topics AS p 
WHERE p.parent_id = 0
UNION 
SELECT  t.id, 
        t.parent_id, 
        t.name, 
        t.parent_id AS sequence
FROM topics AS t
WHERE t.parent_id <> 0
ORDER BY sequence, parent_id, name

Answer 3

As far as i know, you can't do this with a single SQL statement if all you're storing is the parent id. If you need to retrieve the tree of data quickly, you'll have to consider storing a pre-order traversal. It's easier than it sounds and it's very well described here: http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/hierarchical-data-database